Us

by David Nicholls

  ‘It’s glitter, Douglas,’ she said, forcing a laugh. ‘Because it’s Christmas?’

  ‘And I’ll be picking it out of my food and brushing it off my clothes until July! Look at this paint! Paint and glue on the table. Is it washable? No, stupid question, of course, it isn’t—’ I stopped scrubbing, threw the cloth down. ‘Look! Look, it’s on my hands!’ I held them up to the light, to show how brightly they sparkled. ‘I’ve got to go into meetings like this. I have to do presentations! Look! How is anyone supposed to take me seriously when I’m covered in this bloody …’ My son was staring at the table now, his brow creased, lips protruding. Here you are, my darling boy – some memories for you.

  ‘Egg, can you go next door please?’ said Connie.

  He shifted off his seat. ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  ‘I like your Christmas card!’ I said to his back, but it was too late now. Connie and I were left alone.

  ‘Well, you can really suck the joy out of pretty much anything these days, can’t you?’ said Connie.

  But I was not quite ready to apologise yet and the battle that followed, erupting in skirmishes over the remaining days and weeks leading up to Christmas, was too painful and unpleasant to recount in great detail here. The glitter, as predicted, found its way into clothes and hair and the grain of the kitchen furniture; its sparkle would catch my eye as I ate a solitary breakfast in the dark, and the silences, the sniping and bickering continued until Christmas.

  If my own mother ever caught me pulling faces, pouting or sneering, she would tell me: if the wind changes direction, you’ll stay that way. I was sceptical at the time, but as the years passed I was not so sure. My everyday face, the one I wore at rest or when alone, had set and hardened, and wasn’t one I cared for much any more.

  145. christmas

  The day itself was always spent at Connie’s parents, a noisy, boisterous and boozy affair, the tiny terraced house packed with a mind-boggling number of nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles, both Cypriots and Londoners and combinations of the two, the children ever-multiplying, everyone laughing and joking and arguing in a smoky room with the TV on. Later, there’d be ridiculous dancing, four generations trampling walnut shells and Quality Street underfoot. Once upon a time these Christmas Days had seemed like a refreshing change from the rather chilly and restrained affair I was used to from childhood, but since the loss of my parents the event had taken on a melancholy air for me. I was the stranger here, an elderly orphan, an appendix to someone else’s family, and the discord between my wife and me served only to heighten my gloom. There was work at home in my briefcase – perhaps I could sneak off early and do that? No, only lemonade for me. No, thank you, I don’t smoke. And no, thank you, I do not wish to conga.

  Of course Albie loved it there, sipping creamy cocktails when no one was looking, flirting with his cousins, dancing on his uncles’ shoulders, and so I sat and watched and waited. We returned home after midnight, Albie falling asleep in the backseat, and I carried him up to our top-floor flat – the last year I’d be able to do this – and fell backwards on to our bed. The three of us lay together, too exhausted to undress, my son’s breath hot and sweet on my cheek.

  ‘Are you unhappy?’ said Connie.

  ‘No. No, just a little blue.’ That silly word again.

  ‘Maybe we need to make a change.’

  ‘What kind of change?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps a change of scene. So that you’re not tired all the time.’

  ‘Leave London, you mean?’

  ‘If that’s what it’s going to take. Maybe find a house in the country somewhere, so you can drive to work. Somewhere with a good state school nearby. What d’you think?’

  What did I think? In truth, I didn’t love the city any more. It didn’t belong to us in the same way. I did not like explaining to Albie why there were bunches of flowers tied to the railings, or instructing him to avoid the vomit on the way to the shops on Saturday morning. I was bored of road works and building sites – when would they ever finish the place? Why couldn’t they leave it alone? When I returned at night, the city seemed an unnerving and aggressive place; I could feel my grip tightening on the handle of my briefcase as I left the tube, keys clenched in my other fist. Every siren, every terrorist threat seemed more urgent and more personal. And yes, there was all the great art, the wonderful theatre, but when had Connie last been to the theatre?

  Perhaps the countryside was the answer. Sentimental, perhaps, but wouldn’t it be great for Albie to know the names of birds other than magpies and pigeons? When I was a child, on walks my mother would habitually name all the grasses, flowers, birds and trees we passed – Quercus robur, the oak, Troglodytes troglodytes, the wren. These were my warmest memories of her, and even now I can recall the binomial for all the common British birds, though I’ve yet to be asked. But Albie’s knowledge of nature came from trips to the city farm, his sense of the seasons from changes in the central heating. Perhaps exposure to nature would make him less sullen, moody and resentful towards me. I imagined him racing off on a bicycle with fishing net and spotter’s guide, all rosy-cheeked and tousle-haired, then returning at dusk, a jam-jar full of sticklebacks sloshing on the handlebars, the kind of childhood I’d longed for. A biologist in the making; not hard science, but a start.

  It was much more difficult to imagine Connie outside London. She had been born here, studied and worked here. We had fallen in love and been married here, raised Albie here. London exhausted and maddened me, but Connie carried the city around with her; pubs and bars and restaurants, theatre foyers, city parks, the top deck of the 22, the 55, the 38. She was not averse to the countryside, but even in a Cornish cove or on a Yorkshire moor, it seemed as if she might lift an arm and hail a cab.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Sorry, I’m just trying to imagine you in a field on a wet Tuesday in February.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Not easy, is it?’

  ‘What about your work?’

  ‘I’ll commute for a change. Stay over at Fran’s if I have to. We’ll sort that bit out. The main thing is d’you think you could be happy there?’

  I didn’t answer, and she continued:

  ‘I think you would be. Happier, I mean, or less stressed. Which means that we all would be. In the long run.’ Albie shifted in his sleep and curled towards his mother. ‘I’d like you to be happy again. And if that means a new life in a new town … village …’

  ‘Okay. Let’s think about it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I love you, Connie. You do know that.’

  ‘I do. Happy Christmas, my darling.’

  ‘Happy Christmas to you.’

  146. the miracle of air travel

  Madrid in August; the dry heat and dust of it. Flying over the great plains of central Spain that afternoon, peering down, I had never felt so far from the sea.

  After the chaos of the last few days, the journey to Spain had been blissfully smooth, the 0732 train from Siena bringing me to Florence in a little under ninety minutes, the journey slow but pleasant past great vineyards and zone industriale, the pleasure heightened by the excellent sandwich that I gorged on like some kind of caveman, followed by, in quick succession, a banana, an apple, a wonderful orange, the juice dribbling down my chin. Unshaven and not yet bathed, I suspect there was something a little feral about me, hunched in a corner seat, sticky-faced. Certainly the commuters who joined at Empoli regarded me with wariness. I returned their stares. What did I care? Like some newly freed jailbird, I was out and back on the streets, and I slid down in my seat to dream of hot baths, new razor blades, clean white sheets, etc.

  Then into Florence’s rush hour, and an altercation with a staff member about the return of my property, conducted in over-enunciated English. How can I pay charge for overnight storage when wallet is in bag? Return my property and I pay! The sign above says ‘assistenza alla clientela’. I am clientela – why you not assist me? Oh yes, I
was quite the bad-ass now, quite the bad-ass.

  By 0920 I was in possession of my passport, my wallet, my phone charger, my tablet. I hugged them to me, whole again. In the station café I found a corner near a socket and sucked up electricity and wifi like a swimmer coming up for air. No Iberia flights to Madrid from Firenze or Pisa, but a 1235 flight from Bologna. Where was Bologna? Depressingly it seemed that the Apennines stood between that flight and me. But wait – thirty-seven minutes, the timetable said. What kind of miraculous train was this? I could make it with time to spare. I purchased my Madrid flight online, a window seat, hand baggage only, and boarded the Bologna train. In the toilet I coated myself with deodorant stick as if papering a wall. I brushed my teeth, and have never enjoyed the sensation more.

  The trick to crossing the Apennines was to burrow beneath them. Much of the journey took place in a remarkably long tunnel, emerging now and then into light as if curtains had been hurled open to a view of wooded mountainside against bright sky, then whisked shut again. Almost too soon we were in Bologna, one of those cites where the airport is disconcertingly close to the centre, so that you might comfortably walk there with your shopping. But I had learnt my lesson in Florence and took a taxi. My guidebook sang the city’s praises, but the taxi skirted the old town on the northern ring road and what I saw was squat, modern and pleasant, with a fragment of an ancient wall in the centre of a roundabout then the dull warehouses of the airport. Never mind, we’d come here again another time. For the moment, I was happy to find myself in the terminal and checked in with an hour and fifteen minutes to spare. Air travel had never seemed so glamorous, so thrillingly efficient, so full of hope.

  147. atlas

  We took off on time and I craned to look out of the window like a child. Everything was sharp and clear, the air pure, no hint of cloud, and I noted how new this experience was for humankind, the ability to see the earth laid out like this, and how complacent we were about it. Why were people reading magazines when there was all of this to see? Here were the mountains that I’d burrowed beneath just two hours before, there was Corsica, crisply outlined, a mossy green on blue. Then the Mediterranean was left behind and the desert plain unrolled; a desert in Europe. Spain seemed vast to me. No wonder they had once filmed Westerns there. What did it look like at ground level, I wondered, and would I ever find out? Now that I knew my journey was almost complete, the ability to travel seemed exciting again. I was not sure that I wanted to go home, even if I could.

  Then a motorway, suburbs and a great sprawling city very far from water. An airport terminal like the set of a science-fiction film and then out into the thick air of the Spanish afternoon and into a taxi, the motorway to the city half abandoned, passing unpopulated building sites and new apartment blocks, not a human being to be seen. Madrid was unexpected to me. I had no guidebooks or maps, no knowledge or expectations. A corner of Paris could only be Paris, likewise New York or Rome. Madrid was harder to pin down, the buildings that lined the wide avenues a curious mix of eighties office blocks, grand residential palaces, stylish apartment buildings, all compacted together. That European passion for pharmacies was much in evidence, and a great deal of the city seemed as seventies as a lava lamp, while other buildings were absurdly ornate and grand. If Connie had been with me, she’d have named that style. Baroque? Was that right? Neo-baroque?

  ‘What is this?’ I asked my taxi-driver, pointing to an intricately carved palace, the crystalline white of cake icing.

  ‘Post office,’ said the driver, and I tried to imagine anyone buying a book of stamps there. ‘Over there,’ he pointed through the trees of a formal park towards a peach-coloured neo-classical building (Connie, is that right? Neo-classical?) ‘this is the Prado. Very famous, very beautiful. Velázquez, Goya. You must go.’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting my son there tomorrow.’

  148. keys through the letterbox

  In the summer before Albie started ‘big school’ we left the small, garden-less Kilburn flat where he’d grown up and moved to the country. I had tried hard to present the whole experience as ‘an adventure’, but Albie was unconvinced. Perhaps Connie was too, though at least she didn’t pout and whine and sulk like Albie. ‘I’ll be bored,’ he would say, declaring his intentions. ‘I’m leaving all my friends behind!’ he’d say. ‘You’ll make new ones,’ we’d reply, as if friends could be replaced like old shoes.

  For Connie, too, the departure was proving something of a wrench. Evenings and weekends had been given over to ‘sorting things out’, which meant throwing stuff away with a ruthlessness that bordered on anger; old notebooks and diaries, photographs, art-school projects, artists’ materials.

  ‘What about these paints? Can’t you use these? Can’t Albie?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m throwing them away.’

  Or I’d find her drawings in the recycling bin beneath bottles and cans, shake off the mess and hold them up. ‘Why are you throwing this away? It’s lovely.’

  ‘It’s awful. I’m embarrassed by it.’

  ‘I love this picture. I remember it from when we met.’

  ‘It’s just nostalgia, Douglas. We’re never going to hang it up. It’s scrap paper, get rid of it.’

  ‘Well, can I keep it?’

  She sighed. ‘Just keep it out of my sight.’ I took her sketches and drawings, pinned some up at work and put the rest in my filing cabinet.

  Much of Albie’s childhood was discarded; some baby clothes, too, girls’ clothes that we’d bought for our daughter and kept carefully folded in the back of a drawer, not out of mawkish sentimentality nor as some strange totem, but for practical reasons. What if we had another child, a girl maybe? For a while we had tried, but not now. It was all a little too late for that now.

  Never mind, because here was change, here was an adventure, and so the Saturday after Albie’s final term at junior school, the removal men came stomping up those stairs. Nearly fifteen years earlier, two young people had moved into that flat, all of our possessions easily contained in the back of a hired van. Now we were a family, with our own furniture and pictures in proper frames, bicycles and snorkels, guitars, a drum kit and an upright piano, dinner sets and cast-iron cookware and far too many possessions for what was effectively a student flat. The new owners were a young couple in their twenties, baby on the way. They seemed nice at the viewing. We left them a bottle of champagne in the centre of the wooden floor that we’d stripped and painted. While Albie waited in the car, Connie and I walked from room to room, closing the doors. There was no time to be sentimental with the removal van blocking the street outside.

  ‘You ready?’ I said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ she murmured, already descending the stairs.

  I pulled the door shut and posted the keys through the letterbox.

  149. an adventure

  All along the Westway I kept up my babble about it being an adventure, how spacious and grand the new house, new home, would be, how nice it would be to have a garden in the summer. It would feel like undoing a belt after a large meal – finally, a chance to breathe! Albie and Connie remained silent. Along with the keys and the instructions for the boiler, we had left something intangible behind. We had been extraordinarily happy in that little flat, and also sadder than we had ever thought possible. Whatever lay ahead, it couldn’t match those extremes.

  We drove west under overcast skies. The city faded into suburbs, then industrial estates and fir plantations and before long we left the motorway, bounced off the outskirts of Reading, down lanes past fields of wheat and rape; pleasant countryside, though not quite the remote and picturesque idyll I recalled from visits with the estate agent. There seemed to be an awful lot of pylons, a lot of high hedges, cars passing by in quick succession, lorries too. Never mind. We followed the removal van into a gravel drive, our gravel drive, the house early twentieth century, mock-Tudor beams, the largest in the village! There was an excellent state school nearby, my desk was just twent
y minutes’ drive away, there were great rail links. An hour from London by road, too, on a good day. If you listened you could hear the M40! There was work to do, of course, just enough to fill our weekends, but we could be happy here, no doubt about it. On the front drive – with room for three more cars! – I draped my arms around my wife and son like a figure-skating coach. Look, in the trees – magpies, crows! We stood for a moment, then they broke free.

  In the large family kitchen – flagstones, an Aga – I popped a bottle of champagne, pulled glasses from their newspaper and poured out an inch for Egg, and the three of us toasted new beginnings. But after we had placed the boxes in each room and the removal men had left, it became clear that a miscalculation had been made. Try as we might, the three of us could never fill this place. There weren’t enough pictures for the walls or books for the shelves. Even with Albie’s drum kit and guitar, we couldn’t make enough noise to make these high rooms seem occupied. I had intended the house to symbolise prosperity and maturity, a haven of rural calm with good rail links to the chaos of the city. But it felt – and would always feel, I suppose – like a half-empty doll’s house with not quite enough dolls.

  Later that evening, I found Connie standing silently in a small gabled bedroom at the top of the house. The wallpaper was old-fashioned, flowered and marked with doodles, little biro-ed ants and felt-tip butterflies drawn on to the stems and petals of the roses. I knew Connie well enough to guess her thoughts, though we chose not to acknowledge them out loud.

  ‘I thought this room could be your studio. Lovely light! You could paint again. Yes?’

  She rested her head on my shoulder but said nothing.

  We bought a dog.

  150. schweppes!